Handbrake turn on a hair-pin bend: Lavinia Greenlaw and poetic feat
Rose McLaren I will start where I began, with ‘The Casual Perfect’, the poem from which Lavinia Greenlaw’s fourth poetry collection takes its title. It …
CategoryEssays
‘my ties with yous are not unique’: Juliana Spahr’s Lyric in a Global Age
Isabel Galleymore Given that Juliana Spahr’s poetry seeks to establish connection between the individual and the world, there is a certain irony in the way …
The Historical paw-print: thoughts on Ariana Reines’s The Cow
Daisy Lafarge [Spoiler alert: discusses later scenes of the 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Carrie] “I’m gonna bash your little head in, and …
Children sing for Alex Chilton – thoughts on Michael Robbins
Hugh Foley To understand where Michael Robbins is coming from (aside from America) it might help to take a detour to Buzzfeed. There you can …
Alejandra Pizarnik, remembering
Alberto Manguel: I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology …
No Pop, Still Fizzy – Michael Hofmann: Corona, Corona
This is a review by Mick Imlah of Michael Hofmann’s collection Corona, Corona, first published in the TLS in 1993 and extracted here from Mick …
Reading as a Writer: Geography III as Transitional Object
Dominic McLoughlin: When I was in my twenties I took a job as a bookseller at Books & Co on Madison Avenue at 74th Street, …
A definite thread spun: temporal tantalisation in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red
Ralf Webb: In the faculty lounge of the University of Buenos Aires, Geryon— the protagonist of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red— asks a yellow-bearded professor: …
‘It is a wild fucking Kingdom’ – Toby Martinez de las Rivas’s Terror
Rose McLaren: Which is more complicated, life or poetry? Whatever the case, they are seldom complicated in the same way. Yet Toby Martinez de las …
Inside and Out – The force of nature in poems by Ted Hughes (’Wind’); Seamus Heaney (‘Storm on the Island); Ian Hamilton (‘The Storm’) & Brian Jones (‘The Measure of the Need’).
Paul McLoughlin: Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Wind’ plays (its exaggeration is wilful) on the familiar mismatch between human consciousness and unthinking nature. It is an obsessive …